Sandy Bridge

Well, the 990 Pro is now also a problem model. My guess is it's some sort of edge case where it only happens on a small percentage of drives (maybe based on write patterns?) or it would have been caught before shipping. I'd update it if I had one of those (I only have an older Samsung among my stable of SSDs), if only because I wouldn't want whatever triggered the problem to happen to me, likely without realizing it, a few weeks down the road and start eating away at the SSD.

I'd say it depends to some extent on what you're buying. If you're buying high-end CPUs, there's a risk of engineering samples being thrown in, which fall into the "not exactly legit" category - they might be made by Intel but they were never intended for retail sale, and it's the equivalent of buying a pre-production model of a new generation of car - it may do just fine for what you want, or it may not. If it's significantly cheaper than buying from a local seller, there's a significant risk the reason is that it's an engineering sample. Some sellers do list them as such (ES = Engineering Sample) in the listings, so look for that if it seems too cheap to be true. It may be an ES even if they don't list it as such, however. If you'd buying SSDs, pay attention to the brand, the ones no one has heard of are likely to be of lower quality, slower and/or less reliable. If you can't find a review of it by a reputable tech journalism site, don't buy it. I've had good luck with WiFi adapters and batteries (and one cell phone). Shell parts are likely safe, and heatsinks to be pretty reliable too. Read the reviews of the shipper, for an LCD packaging is quite important no matter where it's from, and a well-packed LCD from China is more likely to arrive intact than a shoddily packaged one from two hours up the highway. It probably is worth doing some research on who makes the LCDs, though. Do they also make displays for HP, Dell, or Lenovo? That's a good sign. We might not have heard of them if they just make laptop LCDs and not standalones, but if our laptops use them they're probably at least halfway decent. Worth noting is that Newegg ships a lot of products "Direct from China" now too, and most of the same caveats apply there. They sell SSD brands from China that no one's ever heard of that are quite cheap, and I would not trust my data to those drives. Honestly there's not much more reason to trust Newegg than eBay these days, unless it's either sold by Newegg or sold by the manufacturer. ---- I guess the other note is that it's eBay, to some extent there's risk when buying products there no matter where they're being shipped from. I don't think there's a significant difference in terms of the percentage of dishonest or deceptive sellers from China versus the U.S., and if anything the ones shipping from China tend to know the technical specs of what they're selling better. So I've tried to focus on "if the product is what it says it is, what is there to be aware of?" above. This is consistent with what Eban mentions as well. The container of bikes from China that is 20% bad isn't because they're being dishonest, it's because the quality control of that brand is pretty poor.

Firefox hasn't announced dropping support for 7 or 8.1 yet, so "switch to Firefox" is likely the longest-term-viable option, as it was for XP users before 7. Anything based on Chromium appears likely to not receive further updates, which pretty much leaves Firefox (and its derivatives) as the remaining option. That said, the web moves a lot more slowly than it used to. Websites will only stop working with old browsers gradually over a period of many years. I can still browse the other forum that I frequent (a XenForum running the latest version of XenForo) on Opera 12, which hasn't received a non-security update since 2013. Some news sites work on it too, such as AnandTech. For coffee and news, I wouldn't expect any issues for years to come, especially if you use an ad blocker. A malicious ad slipping through is probably the biggest risk if you stick to reputable sites. (This all assumes you haven't made powerful enemies. If you have powerful enemies who will want to actively hack you, or run a corporate system that hackers would find appealing, it's probably not a great idea to run outdated software)

So... I'm pretty sure by "1k" you mean "2k". "4k" is a marketing term that means 3840x2160. Its predecessor was "1080p" which means 1920x1080, also known as "Full HD". "1k" is an inaccurate retronym that takes the "4k" applying to the (rounded) width in pixels, but incorrectly applies it to the height of its predecessor instead. If 3840 can be rounded to "4k", then 1920 could be rounded to "2k". Or perhaps more easily we use the height in both cases, 1080p versus 2160p. I have a 4K TV but it's only 48", I got it in 4K because even in 2016 it was hard to find a 1080p TV above 40". At that screen size, and viewing from the couch, using Amazon Prime streaming or games via HDMI, I'm hard-pressed to spot a difference. Might be different if it were a 65" or 75" screen. The "eyes get used to it" factor is also there. If I'm watching a DVD, then yes, there's a quality difference versus the same film in Blu-Ray. But if it's a good film, then 5 minutes in I'm focused on what's going on and am not noticing the resolution difference. Sure I'd rather have the Blu-Ray all things equal... but "eyes get used to it" can apply to degraded as well as improved quality. What I really want is 1080p sports, rather than the 720p that dominates live broadcasting today.

I'm also on the "watching The Last of Us, never played the game due to only owning PCs, no PlayStations" bandwagon. Enjoying it. Wish they always launched new episodes on Fridays night instead of Sunday night, can we have a Super Bowl every week?

Tonight I continued my journey towards determining which rapper has the best cookbook. So far the contenders have been Coolio and Snoop Dogg, and right now Snoop Dogg is winning, with his Yardie Yardbird recipe being tonight's dish: The jerk marinade is from scratch, following Snoop's recipe. Pretty tasty! I'd rate it a solid 4 or 4.5 out of 5, and I marinated for the minimum amount of time (1 hour). I was expecting more heat than it had; maybe the habaneros I picked up were unusually mild habaneros? With slightly spicier habaneros and a longer marinade, it would probably be kicked up another half star. Next up is going to be the Doggfather's Tha Next Level Salmon, competing more directly with Coolio's Tricked Out Westside Tilapia, which was about a 3.5/5 when I made it a few years ago. Snoop also has an advantage in sweets, with his Bow Wow Brownies (4/5, would be improved with dark chocolate chips) besting Coolio's Strawberry Hills Banana Muffins (2.5/5). Also on my to-cook list are Dirty South Gumbo and Spaghetti de la Hood. Maybe Cinnamon Rollin' too, and perhaps Orange (but really kinda burgundy) Chicken. Though I didn't need no cookbook to figure out how to make The OG Gin and Juice. Take some gin. Take some juice. Mix it up. That's it. Now if you want to be followin' along, ya need to head to your local bookstore and pick up a copy of From Crook to Cook, ya dig?

I used to live a few hundred yards/meters from a distillery. Easy walking distance over lunch during the pandemic. They made all sorts of things - bourbon, applejack, vodka, nocino, several varieties of gin. I've never been one to go through hard liquor very quickly, probably the fastest was when I was cooking penne alla vodka from scratch fairly frequently, but it was kind of neat having a distillery so nearby. This is Dry February for me (it's like Dry January but with less likelihood of cheating right from the first hour of the first day), so my beverage of the day is green tea. Though it's a bit late now so maybe I'll make some rooibos? Tea is my caffeinated beverage of choice, never have liked the taste or smell of coffee and have resisted the marketing campaigns of energy drink manufacturers. The exception to that caffeinated rule is that if I'm in Germany, I'll go for Club-Mate. I wish it were available here! I've tried a couple of the American yerba maté soda-pops and they just aren't the same, most are too sweet or too carbonated, Club-Mate has the perfect balance of flavors, sweetness, and moderate carbonation.

Entirely believable. I've been on a team where no one was really happy, although it was much, much less unhappy than Twitter, and people became very open about interviewing. "I have a dental appointment this afternoon" was our not-so-secret code for "I have an interview" - or occasionally an actual dental appointment - and eventually even the managers in the area would ask, "how'd your interview go?" if they saw you in the elevator lobby. Twitter is probably like that now - as long as the goons aren't around, no one is going to judge you for looking elsewhere. More likely they'll ask for a reference.

Two remaining principal engineers, which is now just one. Twitter may not have the same level of title inflation as a lot of companies, but two principal engineers for a company of its size seems like an absurdly low number to me. Also noteworthy is that researchers at Northeastern University, Rutgers, and Harvard have found a 9% drop in the Twitter userbase in the U.S. since Musk took over. That might not be fatal but if it continues at that rate on a quarterly basis it eventually will be. Relevant quote from The Verge: Sounds about right, lose the entire team responsible for something and it's much easier for someone unfamiliar with it to cause it to break. We have a similar situation where I work, where a long-inactive project is low on space and we're paranoid about deleting data from 2009 because we don't want to break Twitter break our service. Easier to just add more storage space and leave the data there just in case. Makes my workplace sound utopian by comparison, we only have "putting out fires" as a regular occurrence!

Huh, those are some interesting applications. I'm never going to have the same level of trust of night sky photos after looking at Luminar Neo's sky enhancement technology though! As a software developer, the blanket statement about DirectX doesn't make sense to me. From the benchmarks I have followed, mostly on Phoronix, a Linux journalism site, the key factor that can result in much lower Linux graphics performance, particularly for games, is using less optimized drivers. Use open-source nVIDIA drivers, and you can indeed be looking at a 30% performance loss, but the problem is in the drivers, not the graphics API. Last I checked (and it's been a while), AMD open-source drivers had less of a disparity with their closed-source drivers and with their Windows drivers, and nVIDIA closed-source drivers were pretty good too. No idea about Intel, I've never run Linux with Intel graphics. How much of that "drivers matter a lot more on Linux" carries over into video and photo editing, I'm not sure, but that is something to do some research on. Especially if you're on nVIDIA, I'd recommend the proprietary drivers. For DirectX versus OpenGL/Vulkan... DirectX12 and Vulkan are the highest-performance options for those willing to spend the time to implement them well. They're both low-level and high performance. DirectX 11 and earlier, as well as OpenGL, are older, higher-level APIs. For a while OpenGL may have been trailing a bit behind DirectX 10 and 11, but it was on Mac where that was really noticeable as Apple fell a long way behind current OpenGL support. Not that there aren't instances of programs where the development team wrote the application on Windows first and knew DirectX quite well, and then ported it to Linux but didn't really know OpenGL well and wound up with a much less performant port, I am sure that has happened. And maybe the elusive videos you've mentioned were benchmarking applications where something like that had happened. But I wouldn't expect that to be the case across the board. In terms of specific benchmarks, Puget Systems (a Seattle-based builder of boutique PCs) did a detailed Linux vs Windows (with nVIDIA graphics) comparison a few years ago, which you can read here. Their tl;dr conclusion was they were surprised to see a slight edge (single-digit percentage) for Windows 10, but not enough that they would recommend anyone choose Windows 10 just for that slight edge. Although they did touch on the "drivers on Linux" challenge: That kind of issue is a significant part of why I haven't looked much at Linux in recent years - updating graphics drivers was never as reliable as on Windows. I'd update my open-source AMD graphics drivers and the graphical user interface wouldn't work any more. Maybe my card was too old, maybe it was too new, but it wasn't worth my time debugging.

I suppose I don't yet follow the focus on DirectX. It sounds like you specifically want to run a Windows program. DirectX is proprietary Microsoft technology, so as long as Windows is selling well and Microsoft feels DirectX is a competitive advantage, it's never going to come to Linux with native support. And since you can only target DirectX support on Windows, you'll always have to run it via WINE (AFAIK). Thus it's more difficult to get good reliable performance for DirectX on Linux than it is to get, say, compatibility with 3dfx's Glide API on non-3dfx cards on Windows. You not only have to emulate the graphics API, but have to emulate the rest of the system API via WINE. There will always be a performance disadvantage, the question is how much of one. If you are serious about potentially switching to Linux and performance parity is important, finding Linux-native programs for your workflows is what I would advise. I've heard GIMP can replace Photoshop effectively (after a bit of a learning curve), for example. There's probably an equivalent in video editing too, although I don't really know much about that on either platform. I gather that neither Elementary nor Mint made that livable standard? I'm curious as to the reasons why. That might also help others identify which other distros are promising for your needs.

What about programs running Vulkan? It's cross-platform including Linux and high performance. I don't know how much of a performance hit there would be with OpenGL or running DirectX via WINE, but those might be options too. I haven't explored new Linux distros in some time, but when I did most recently I settled on Mint as one that makes it pretty convenient to get up and running out of the box. No hunting for proprietary codecs if you need them. Several different desktop environments available - Cinnamon, MATE, and I guess they dropped the KDE edition, but they still have XFCE. I'm not a fan of plain-old GNOME - too streamlined and not as customization-friendly as KDE - but found Mint had pretty good defaults and some additional Mint-specific software that made it easier to operate through the UI without dropping back to the command line as much. Which as an end user I like, I don't want to be a sys admin. I've heard good things about Zorin OS, and it seems to fill the same niche as being easy to use from a GUI standpoint. Only downside is I always think of the Bond villain of the same name. I've also heard good things about Pop! OS for similar reasons of ease of use. I've long been curious about elementary OS as well, and it just had a new major-version release a few days ago.

I've heard those cross-platform-posting tools are popular, and for good reason, who wants to have to manually post the same thing to six platforms? So far my experiment with blocking Twitter on my home network has been going well. Occasionally I will see an article with an embedded Tweet that doesn't load, but there's usually enough context in the article to get the gist of it anyway. And sometimes someone will post just a link to a Tweet on a forum, without any commentary. I take those the same way as someone sending me a YouTube link without any description of why they think it would be worth my time - it probably wasn't worth it in the first place. There is one site I browse where the Tweets still show up in a widget they use. Most likely that widget is fetching them via the Twitter API, it will be interesting to see if that stops working next week.

Two Noctua case fans, in brown. Some people measure their success by their clothes or their cars. Others by having the latest most powerful GPUs. For me it's the quality of my power supply and case fans. There is a significant risk that I'll like these enough that I'll wind up ordering several more.

Indeed, from a user (not search engine) standpoint, the main benefit is it lets you easily find other threads with the same tag. Maybe I want to find other "windows 7" threads, or "music" threads, for example. For this forum in particular, it can be used to tag the model of laptop in question. On forums that don't require tags, you're at the mercy of the search engine, which will often pull in other threads that only mention "windows 7" in the body for example. Or they might decide "7" is fewer characters than their minimum search term length of 3 (a restriction I've run into on some forums). They'll probably become more useful over time as we acquire more threads. On the old NotebookReview forum, where in its heydey there would be many threads per laptop, having the laptop tagged would have been great - find the entire world's cumulative knowledge about your laptop with one tag.

I play a lot of older games that don't support cloud saving. This XKCD very much describes me: That PC Gaming Wiki site does look familiar from my various searches for save game locations. I've had good luck finding the locations I need via DuckDuckGo, it's just the actual synchronization that can be mildly annoying. In other words I see the appeal in Steam's cloud save feature, I just don't choose what I play based on whether the game supports it.

Can confirm that it does not run on Polaris GPUs. At least they have a demo so you can try it out and see if it works without having to go through a refund if it doesn't. Probably won't bother trying it on my computer that actually meets the minimum (and most of the recommended) requirements. Too many other games I want to play more in my Steam backlog.

I have tried it once or twice but it has been awhile. I recall it working fairly well, and come to think of it, it would solve the "saves are remote" issue too. Yeah, I'll have to give it another go. I did not realize that it could work even with non-Steam games. That is a nice bonus since I do play some Good Old Games occasionally.

I can see the appeal for someone who mostly keeps the laptop on a desk. My dad's an example - 98% of the time his laptop is on a desk, so he always buy a 17" laptop. Once in a blue moon he'll take it out to the living room to surf the web while watching a basketball game on TV, and once a year or so he might take it down to a beach rental to use in the evenings while on vacation. Portability isn't very important, but a nice screen size is. Of course he's now thinking of switching to a desktop since it doesn't move 98% of the time, but he will still have the existing one for the other 2%. My sister used to have one of the HP HDX laptops and loved it for its screen, I can't recall if it was the 16" or 18" model. We revived it a few years back and I've never seen anyone so nostalgic for a Windows Vista machine. They also had the 20" HDX Dragon. But even that ridiculously large laptop could make sense if you were a heavy LAN gamer and were taking it to friends' houses or meetups where you could set it on a desk while you gamed. Better than hauling around a laptop and a monitor. I'll most likely stick with 15.4" or maybe move up to 16" over the next half-decade, since my use cases have slightly more portability in mind, but I welcome the new options. They don't have to have SLI, more screen real estate has value of its own.

RDP is pretty good nowadays, I'm on my laptop now but am actually RDP'ed into my desktop since I've already logged into NotebookTalk on the desktop, and I had to check whether I was native or RDP since I've been browsing for a while tonight. A lot of what I find myself switching between systems for, though, is games. Play a new game on the new system. Play an old game where all my saves and config is set up on the old system. That game with an 80 GB install? It's staying on the old one until I upgrade to more storage. We'll see, maybe I'll do that in February. Migrating Windows installs sounds interesting. You're probably on 10 everywhere? I don't think I'd want to clone my 8.1 desktop to my new laptop. Cloning my 2018 laptop is a somewhat interesting idea that I hadn't thought of.

To be fair, typically 8.1 has been getting updates once a month on Patch Tuesday, and we are not yet to the first Patch Tuesday (February) where it won't be getting updates. Assuming there are no out-of-schedule patches, the "end of support" typically means the last Patch Tuesday, so the OS doesn't actually fall behind on patches until a month later. And it really does depend on your habits. We aren't in the Wild West days of Windows XP SP0 anymore where just connecting to the Internet could result in viruses (or so I've heard). Networking hardware is more secure, Windows has had a firewall built-in since XP SP2 that will keep working even after support expires, and we can stream music from Spotify instead of having to hope that the file we downloaded from KaZaA really is the latest Weird Al hit. I'd even venture that so long as you are interacting with known-safe sites, you're probably safer browsing the web on XP SP3 today, 8+ years after its date of expiry, than you would have been in early 2002 when it didn't have a firewall. 8.1 will continue to benefit from those XP SP2 security improvements, as well as many more since then. It's really the "doing things that would violate NotebookTalk's terms of use" part of web surfing that becomes riskier the farther out of support you get.

What I don't get is how Musk expects the "not paying rent" strategy to end up working out well for Twitter. Not renewing leases would make sense, but simply not paying rent - and millions of dollars of rent at that - is going to invite lawsuits, and is going to make it very difficult for Twitter to rent offices when they do want to do so - they'll probably have to pay the whole lease up front, which worsens their cash flow problem. I mean, if I were one of the few landlords where Twitter was still paying, I would definitely be demanding that when the lease came up for renewal! Add to that the legal fees for the lawyers they'll need (and that the lawyers will demand being paid up front since previous lawyers got stiffed), and it doesn't add up at all. Is any court really going to look at these cases and say it's okay for Twitter to not pay their contractually obligated rent? The only case where I can see that happening is if it also involves Twitter filing for bankruptcy or insolvency, which while a plausible end result presumably wouldn't be the goal. ---- As a side note, I could see this spilling over reputationally for Musk's other businesses as well. If I'm a commercial real estate manager and I see Tesla on my rent roll, I am going to be flagging that as a potential risk; if their cash flow starts decreasing what's to say Musk isn't going to pull the same stunt there? They seem to have a healthy cash flow right now, but if it's a five year lease, would they do the same thing in 2026 if EV competition heats up and they aren't bringing in tons of bacon anymore?

AFAIK the Leaf still uses passive cooling whereas Teslas (and most other EVs as I understand it) use active cooling, and that contributes to the Leaf's battery having lower longevity (and perhaps lower range in temperature extremes) than active-battery-cooling EVs. I am less sure about Tesla batteries operating at a wider range of temperatures than other actively cooled EVs, or perhaps more accurately stated having longer ranges (less falloff from their "normal", say 70 Fahrenheit, range) at those temperature extremes. My guess would be that would depend on the battery chemistry as well as the battery heating/cooling, and Tesla has diversified their battery chemistry in recent years, as have some other manufacturers. So it's probably complicated? Definitely something to do more research on if living in an area with long, cold winters. A Norwegian could probably give you a better answer; they have the cold climate but also have a very healthy and increasingly diverse EV market.

I've considered renting a Tesla on Turo to have the experience over a weekend, without the commitment. May well do that with other EVs as a trial run too, although the last I checked most of the local EV Turo market was Teslas. If I were renting a Model S Plaid and happened to find myself first at the red light on the local straight-as-arrow US Highway, yeah, I'd be curious what the 0-60 time was, and what that felt like (probably wouldn't try it flat out until the second time though!). But I'm ultimately too practical to buy a car just for acceleration when my humble 4-cylinder meets what I want 98% of the time and a general-purpose EV like a Leaf or Bolt probably would easily cover the remaining 2% (mostly highway intersections that have relatively short but fairly busy merge windows). I think the fit and finish issues are probably more "new manufacturer versus established manufacturer" than petrol vs EV though. If Honda or Toyota made an EV, I'm sure the fit and finish would be very good. Audi and BMV probably have very good fit and finish. The Kia Niro is probably good. Even Tesla may have increased the fit and finish somewhat by now. Although I wonder if over the longer-term they'll be closer to GM and Chrysler in quality than Honda and Toyota.

Technically, yes... but even before Elon bought Twitter, I wasn't going to buy a Tesla because of its minimalist user interface and lack of physical knobs and controls. I don't want to have to take my eyes off the road to operate a touchscreen. Hyundai and Kia are out because of the Kid Kids and the risk of theft. My downstairs neighbor's Hyundai was stolen in broad daylight. I have family members who are concerned their Hyundai will be stolen while they're shopping, and it's not an idle concern, just a few weeks ago the local paper had another story about a couple who were performing as Santa and Mrs. Claus at a local store, and while they were performing, their Hyundai got stolen from the parking lot. The 2023 models aren't vulnerable to theft, but it isn't evident that it's a 2023 model just from looking at it, so they're still going to attract thieves who break in only to find they can't hot-wire it. Not worth it. I'd also rather buy a "real" hatchback and not jump on the SUV bandwagon. You are right that the difference can be slight, but as a member of a family with a decades-long history of owning sedans and hatchbacks, I have no desire to be the first one to deviate from that.